There was a tradition that the house was a retreat of Claude Duval’s, and the house and Lane were sometimes known as “Duval’s.” There is, however, no direct evidence to connect the famous highwayman with the house, and Duval’s House may be considered as a popular corruption of Devil’s House. In a survey of Highbury Manor made in 1611, this house already bears the name of “Devil’s House in Devil’s Lane” and is described as being at that date an old building “with a mote, and a little orchard within.” In the Islington Survey of 1735, it appears as “Devol’s House,” an apparent compromise between the fiend and the highwayman. It is not known to have been a place of entertainment till 1767 when the landlord,[178] who attempted to change the name to the Summer House, offered to London anglers and pedestrians the attraction of “tea and hot loaves, ready at a moment’s notice, and new milk from the cows grazing in the pleasant meadows adjoining.” The house was still encompassed with a wide moat crossed by a bridge, and there was an orchard with a canal. The garden which surrounded the house was well laid out, and the water was stocked with abundance of tench and carp. The place was still occupied and used as an inn in 1811,[179] though about that time the landlord nearly filled up the moat with earth. The house was in existence in 1849 (or later),[180] being on the east of the Hornsey Road near the junction with the Seven Sisters’ Road. [Lysons’s _Environs_ (1795), “Islington,” p. 127, note; Nelson’s _Islington_, 133, 173; Lewis’s _Islington_, pp. 67, 279, 280; Larwood and Hotten, _Signboards_, 294, 295, quoting a letter signed H. G., 25 May, 1767, in the _Public Advertiser_, which describes the place at that period; Walford, ii. 275; Tomlins’s _Perambulation of Islington_, pp. 31, 32.] VIEWS. 1. A view of the house, gardens and bridge appears in Walford, v. 378, “Claude Duval’s House in 1825.” 2. Devil’s or Du Val’s House, Holloway, a sepia drawing by C. H. Matthews (1840); Crace, _Cat._ p. 604, No. 190. HORNSEY WOOD HOUSE. Hornsey Wood House was situated on the summit of rising ground on the east of Hornsey and at the entrance to Hornsey Wood. It began to be frequented about the middle of the last century,[181] and in the earlier years of its existence aspired to be “a genteel tea-house,” though unpretending in appearance. On popular holidays, such as Whit-Sunday, its long room might be seen crowded as early as nine or ten in the morning with a motley assemblage of “men, women and children eating rolls and butter and drinking of tea at an extravagant price.”[182]